"We’re looking at every opportunity that we can to provide as much of the Oracle technical stack in an NT environment," says Robin Green, Oracle’s vice president of global integrator alliances, system products group.

Last month, Oracle announced a similar arrangement with Dell Computer Corp. (Round Rock, Texas, www.dell.com). Dell is factory installing Oracle8 and Oracle8 Enterprise Edition on its PowerEdge enterprise servers. The Dell arrangement represented the first time Oracle database software had been factory installed by a server manufacturer.

Compared to the Dell deal, the arrangement with Unisys offers more of the Oracle environment on the ClearPath enterprise servers, which run applications and databases for Windows NT or UnixWare along with those for Unisys mainframe environments. As of January 15, Unisys will package Windows NT versions of ClearPath with Oracle8, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Developer, Oracle Developer Server, and Oracle J Developer. The deal will include eight-user trial licenses. The companies will replace Oracle8 with Oracle8i when the new version of Oracle’s flagship database becomes generally available.

According to Green, the deal will allow Unisys customers to access data in their Unisys mainframes with applications that run on Windows NT. "This is a complete development environment to leverage Unisys customers and their NT strategies," Green says. --Scott Bekker, Staff Reporter